


A few unfortunate thoughts on the grooming habits of rodents

by yoolee



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: All the Marauders are present but not physically, Canon Divergent, MWPP, Wormtail did not ask for this, Wormtail picked a bad moment to suddenly find a spine, first wizarding war, no one asked for this actually not even me but here we are, or a very good moment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24344344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yoolee/pseuds/yoolee
Summary: In which Peter Pettigrew—during a moment that is somehow both his proudest but also one he regrets rather violently due to a suspicion that it will end (like most things he tries to do by himself) Very Badly—keeps a Secret.
Relationships: Peter Pettigrew & James Potter & Remus Lupin & Sirius Black
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	A few unfortunate thoughts on the grooming habits of rodents

**Author's Note:**

> To the lovely folks who have an author subscription alert on me, hoping for steamy samurai content, I am so, SO sorry that instead all I have for you is a moody ass pretentious character study of a minor and incredibly annoying character no one likes except in a few fanfics, in a fandom I have never written for on AO3 (we don’t talk about my middle school fics). I throw my weary and distracted soul at your fabulous feet and plead in earnest for forgiveness. And also maybe some cheese, if you have any to spare. I’m quite low on cheese at the moment, though I ought to be eating veggies anyhow.
> 
> To the Marauder fandom—ahaha, er, hello, am I in the right place???

Rats are actually quite clean creatures.

He’s tried to explain this a number of times to anyone who would listen, but it’s not the sort of thing most folk care about, so ‘anyone’ more or less turned out to just be ‘Remus’. Remus, who listened quietly and then nodded and added that he’d read they were _known to be pretty empathetic too, you know, rats I mean._

(Padfoot overheard and teased him for two weeks about his  _Feelings. Feelings_ with a capital  _F_ that Moony’s research said he had, and it was all _wee ickle empathetic Wormtail_ and  _would he kindly share his chocolate because rats _shared _things_ , because they had  _Feelings_ and Peter had been  _Feeling_ like Pads could take a short walk into a cold lake and that it was really _very bloody annoying_ that no one cared about what he had  _actually_ been trying to share which was the fact that rats were  not filthy they  really very clean animals, _thank you very much_.)

He sucks in a breath.

It stinks like too many bodies in a tight space and no way out.

_Peter_ cares about it. The cleanliness.  


The twitching, compulsive, fastidious itch is always there, has been since the first transformation (which was their fault. It wasn’t even his idea and why did he turn out to be a rat, anyway?). Now it’s just _there._ All the time. Lick, paw, nibble, repeat. Wash your paws-no-hands, wash your face, wash your ears, repeat. Again, and again, wash, nibble, groom, clean. It gets louder the smaller he feels, helpless, helpless and small and in need of a scrub to feel safe and sneaky and to get away, so far away from all of this.

Right.

This.

Right now, Peter wants terribly to lick his palms and scrub them through his hair. He wants to squeak and bare his teeth and he wants to run away with whiskers guiding him in the dark, dark,  _dark_ it’s so _bloody dark_. 

He wants, viciously, traitorously, to stand straight and smirk sly, to cock his head and crow, tell them, tell the Dark Lord before him everything he knows and see him smile, hear his praises, _him_ and the power he has right now, the power he can give them, and only him, because he’s the only one who has it.

(He wants to wash his hands.)

It distracts him with a huff and he thinks _maybe it’s mum’s fault_ ,  that part of him that makes him twitch and twitch and wash. Sometime when he was too young to recall she read a muggle book about germs and went nutters over it. He’s always sort of blamed muggles for his mum. If it hadn’t been for that book ... He thinks of her and with it comes the the too-strong stench of bleach and lemon, the cool sterile touch of scrubbed tile, and the rattling, wretched need to be clean, clean, clean. His hands twitch.

There’s a weird, wild moment of incongruence, where he’s thinking about his mum’s face with its bright round cheeks framed with blobbed curls that bounce as she draws breath to keep scolding him. It’s weird because he’s staring at the Dark Lord. The _Dark Lord_ , and thinking about his mum. His mum and her germs and her voice yelling about  _mud in this house, young man_. He blinks placidly. That’s almost certainly weird.

(Maybe it’s not. _Mud_ , he thinks, dizzy and sick because he remembers the Dark Lord can read minds and there’s something about it. About mud. Mud, mud, blood, wet and stinking and squelching. His mum scared him when she was young. The Dark Lord terrifies him now.)

(He rubs his hands on his trousers and is unsurprised that the palms are damp)

He thinks he’ll be alright for a second. But then the Dark Lord speaks.

“ _Well_ , Mr. Pettigrew?”

All thoughts of _power_ screech to a shrill halt. His stomach slams to his spine and he claws down the urge to vomit in raw terror.  


It’s a horrifying sound. 

His _name_ in that amused, dismissive whisper of a voice, slick and smooth like hot blood smeared on still-warm skin and Wormtail wants to run. 

They’re all staring at him. Waiting. 

_Well_ the voice said, _Well_ coated in a laugh at his expense, the sadness and smallness and insignificance of his presence, and Peter feels his lips twitch into a snarl before he remembers to smooth them into subservience because _he’s not stupid_.

But he _has_ taken too long to answer.

“The Potters?” The voice asks, and it’s there, in  _that_ name instead. The vicious, lilting rage, wrapped in quicksilver and bloodstained silk, disguised as a pretty question when it reeks like poison from his thin lips, filthy and ferocious and loathing. There’s no laugh wrapped around _Potters_ , no dismissal or distraction. The Dark Lord cares about that name. About  _Potters_.

(Peter forgets about the almost scowl at being thought insignificant, and is very glad there is no loathing wrapped around _Peter_ which is not so far off from  _Potter_ in pronunciation, but he didn’t say  _Peter_ did he, he said  _Pettigrew_ and it was careless, it was nothing. He’s nothing.)

He’s relieved, honestly. He tells himself that. He is. He’s relieved that the Dark Lord doesn’t acknowledge him as a threat. That’s safest. That’s sneakiest. That’s tall, rattling grass and dry packed dirt when there are owls overhead.

He’s not _stupid_. 

He knows everyone thinks so, but he isn’t. It’s just that Padfoot and Prongs, well, they were always so clever, weren’t they? Effortlessly brilliant. And _we can’t_ _ all __be effortless geniuses_ , he thinks with the same annoyance he had once a forever ago regarding _Feelings_ when he just wanted to object to the descriptor of _filthy_. Some folk, folk like Peter, are just normal, and it’s not his fault that  normal looks like  stupid when you’re standing next to brilliant. Moony wasn’t all that smarter than he was, and the name is bitter in his brain, but he was better about keeping his mouth shut, and gave off that odd, quiet, awkward bookworm vibe that allowed him a free lumping in with  brilliant even if his marks were only alright. Mature, they always said of Moony, those professors who looked at Peter clicked their tongues in pity.

Well it turns out none of them are so smart after all, are they?

He thinks it without triumph, just an exhausted tall-grass resignation. After all stubborn is it’s own kind of stupid in the end, and it’s the kind of stupid that’s going to get them all killed, because they can’t see that this is a war they can’t win. That it’s already over, really. It’s a fantasy to think they can. The same kind of wild, reckless, childish stupid that ended with him as a rat whose hands twitch to wash. Maybe it’s all the prank wars, Peter thinks, the sneaking around school. They think they’re invincible, that they’ll always win because they only have evidence that supports the singular outcome of their own invincibility.

Well, this isn’t a Quidditch cup, and they’re not up against half-hearted students and they won’t win, and Peter isn’t stupid and he isn’t stubborn, and he isn’t going to die today.

(Something rotten and reeling twinges in the back of his thoughts, somethingabout _dying_ _today_ , and he wants to have paws instead of hands, wants to scratch at it and scrape it out and off his skin, but he’s not a rat right now and he keeps his head down)

“Tell me.” The poison-whisper again. Filthy, filthy. 

Eager. 

Eager for _Peter_ to speak. 

Eager to hear what  _Peter_ has to say, to listen to what  _Peter_ knows and he doesn’t. 

Peter wants to cackle, look— look who wants to listen to him now!— and he straightens, and sneers like Sirius used to do and opens his mouth and he starts, “The Potters—” snag on his lips, in his throat, they do. All three of them, the Potters. Five, because he remembers summers, suddenly, when it wasn’t so dark even when the sun set. They choke him because they’re so coated in loathing and he barely recognizes their pronunciation and he only realizes it because he just heard it in a different voice not his own, and yet there it was in his too.

When did he start to hate the _Potters?_

They get...tangled up, it feels like, suddenly and inexorably and in a number of things Peter did not know were there in his throat for them to get wrapped up in at all. Envy, (alright, he knew that one) horrible, reeking, wretched envy that veered into awe sometimes, and glee at others, and twisting rotten hatred and guilt and _Lily_ and longing and stupid moonlit laughter and _James_ and hot summers and open arms and hot summers with no owls at all and shame and he  _wants to wash his bloody hands _ because _Potters_ because their _name_ tastes filthy and it has for awhile though he’s just noticing it because he hasn’t heard it from his own voice.   


Not for awhile. 

When did he last say  _Potters?_

In a pub, he thinks dimly. After several pints and to a person who was  listening. Nodding sympathetically with soothing words. How unfair they were, how unkind to poor old Petey.

Their name was already rotten in his throat then, but he’d been too drunk to taste it. When or why did it change? _Lily_ he thinks with a snarl but it doesn’t sound like it came from him, because he remembers he didn’t think she was all that bad, but it must have changed after school. When? _Potters_ was once was sweet and golden and awed and he chokes on it now, on the loathing, and ends on a sort of strangled, confused squeak, and they’re all staring.

Peter is  _Feeling_ all right.  


He’s feeling bloody terrified.  


“Sorry—” he wants to squeak, but it comes out as a breath, and ends in a whine at the curled lip and irritation that sparks in eyes like a snake’s.

_Spit it out_ _,_ he thinks over rising, sweat-soaked panic,  _spit it out and they’ll be grateful._ It’s power, it’s power and it’s why he’s here and it will buy him his life and he can slip away until it’s all over. 

( _Over_ rattles in the same place as  _dying_ _today_ and one of Peter’s hands with its too-long nails yanks up to scrabble the back of his head where it thinks the thought came from.)

“The Potters—” he tries again and his voice trips again, less loathing and more baffled uncertainty, around Harry, _that’s his name isn’t it? Better than Fleamont,_ though Peter doesn’t get the appeal of the squirming, bright-cheeked, drooling bundle of shrieks and crying, and James and Lily,  Lily who Peter never liked, or thought he didn’t (hates her, he hates her, there he said it, because James was his best friend and he was supposed to be there and then she said yes and why did she have to say yes), but who in the end he thought, looked so kind and pretty holding that tiny bundle that James loved so much it made him stupid, when he had only ever remembered her ferocious and glowering.

But she wasn’t glowering. She was smiling from in the doorway, scent of dinner spilling out along with the golden light of a single lamp, and the shattered, grim hope of a Secret he swore to keep while standing just at the edge, where the light didn’t wash over his muddy boots they didn’t care about the mud, _oh_ _just hurry and come in,_ almost friendly she’d said, _though dinner isn’t ready yet._ And a laugh beside her, a gurgling hiccup from the bundle _I won’t poison you Wormy even I can manage spaghetti alright.  
  
_ And who burns spaghetti in the middle of a war zone?

James Potter, Peter thinks, biting his lips hard enough that metal and salt scalds away the not so old echo of burnt sauce. James Fleamont Potter burns spaghetti and doesn’t clean up the stove where it spilt until he sees Peter frown at it and then he snorts a _scourgify_ even though he doesn’t care because he knows Perter does and he’s already moved on, pulling out the ten thousandth photo of his sleeping son and increasingly exasperated wife.

(It’s a sudden sort of longing. A ferocious, lasting feeling. The kind that leaves a mark. Deeper than anyone who had ever met him could expect from mousy, mediocre, miserable Peter Pettigrew. Deeper than  he expects from himself, given how quickly he took himself off to tell what he’d been told, only to choke on the thought, on the words, on their _lives_ in this very long, very terrifying, incredibly unpleasant moment.)

He garbles.

A wheezing squeak around spit and bile that turns into fit of coughing and they watch, and wait, impassive and unmoving and he thinks even Pads, even  _Pads_ would’ve pounded on his back. Moony’d have tea in his hands as soon as it stopped and Prongs, Prongs—he can hear it like an echo  _Alright there, Pete_? 

(He doesn’t know what Lily would do. He thinks maybe he ignored a lot of things about Lily. Probably because Prongs never bloody shut up about her. Blocking her out was self-defense, really. Had to protect himself from Prongs and his lovesick insanity.)

They’re all watching, watching like owls in the sky, but it’s the snake with its smile that scares him most. Waiting.

(Pete’s always protecting himself.)

The last bit of cold spit wrenches out of his lungs and Peter’s mouth closes.

He tells himself he’s closed it so that choking doesn’t become vomiting because really that’s just what this day needs. He tells himself that but his hands are covered in his own snot and saliva and he’s not going to wash them, he’s not going to need to and he knows it and feels ( _Feels, _ he thinks rather hysterically, capital F) an overwhelming and incapacitating terror.

But his lips are still pressed to one another. His mouth is closed.

It’s not even a heroic thing.

(It’s a little heroic). 

(Maybe.)

It wouldn’t _have to be_ , if he wasn’t  here, if he hadn’t scampered out like a traitorous (to four) sycophant (to one), but he did. Stupid! Stubborn!

He decides quite casually that he now hates Sirius Black. Hates him with a blind panicky fury for the decision that means Peter is  _here_ and has to  _decide_ when he thought he already had.  


He hasn’t.

His mouth is closed but his soul isn’t and that’s the one that matters for these things. This thing that he shouldn’t have. He can’t. He can’t, he absolutely can’t. He’s alone. He’s never been good alone. He’s not brave when he’s alone. (He’s never brave, is he.) he doesn’t know what to do with power. He needs someone to tell him what to do with it, and he looks up at snake eyes and thinks _it’s Sirius’s fault._ He wishes Sirius were  here, _here_ , scorn in his scowl and derision dripping in his clipped voice, to tell him who cares if it stinks it’s time to man up, he’s a Gryffindor isn’t he, even though they aren’t in school, and this isn’t school, and he’s _probably going to die_ if he doesn’t spill the Secret. Death is horrible and final and maybe Sirius can laugh at it and Moony can frown about it but Peter has seen the broken bodies and cold limbs and they were all _alone_.

Peter makes a strangled sound in the otherwise silent seconds after his choking subsides.

Well he’s _going_ to spill it, he thinks, a vicious repudiation of the Sirius in his head. He doesn’t want to die, and he isn’t stupid, and he isn’t stubborn. And his _Well_ is just a normal _well_ and there’s no laughter in it.

And it’s a stupid, silly, petty thing. 

(His hands fuss with themselves, slick with spit, but they don’t scrub his face.)

But he thinks about laughing.

They were just schoolmates, weren’t they? Just blokes who shared a dorm, and hung out because proximity made them feel like friends who handed out scraps of affection and attention only when the preferred options weren’t available. James never liked him as much as he liked Moony or Padfoot, or—Gods—Lily. And Peter rather thinks that he didn’t like  them, as people, all that much either. No, he thought, all along, what he liked was the sense of not being alone.

Marauders made no man—or mouse—live alone.

He’s going to _die_ alone if he doesn’t open his bloody mouth and _tell them._

He wishes James were here, because he can be brave with James around. Except if James were here, he’d be dead, because that’s why they’re gathered and Peter realizes, suddenly and horribly, that he  _doesn’t want James to die._

And that—Ah.

Peter goes very, very still.

He does not twitch. Not once, but his eyes feel very wide in his face and his throat is very clear and very dry and he doesn’t want James Potter to die.

Unfortunate time to realize it, he thinks, as that rotting silk voice slithers around  _I am not a patient man, Mr. Pettigrew_ and soaks his name in the slime he deserves and he hasn’t really got the time to weigh the pros and cons of just how much, which was more a Moony thing to do in any case. He’s just got to make a decision in the moment now, which is a Padfoot thing. And he wants it, unexpectedly and quite suddenly, so suddenly it’s horrifically, miserably painful—though that might be the hexes come to think—to make the right one. A good one. That’s…that’s a Prongs thing. It’s a Prongs thing to want to do more. To be more.

None of these are Wormtail things, Peter thinks. He can’t, and his mouth opens. It’s always been a Wormtail thing to stand beside more, and hope some of it washes over him without him having to work too hard for it.

It turns out, he thinks, with an odd, high, tinny panic in his ears but certainty alongside it, he does. It’s an irony he’s not clever enough to appreciate, the fact that he’s scared witless even as he finds there’s Gryffindor steel in his soul after all, closing fast and and unyielding around a Secret, because he loves his best friend, his best friend who has at least two other best friends and maybe a third who all come before him but chose Peter for this anyway. Yeah, he likes them. Quite a lot.Too much, at the moment, because it’s enough to make him stupid, and stubborn, and he’s so bloody scared.

Bollocks to that, he thinks distantly, and he laughs, a terrified squeak that sounds like a sob, because they’d approve of him cussing flippantly right now, like they always did around prefects and professors, and he’d thought to prove to them all that he could be as big and bad and bold and dangerous and it’s  stupidly late to realize it is a game after all but not for points and he picked the wrong players.

His mouth is still open but it doesn’t matter, the steel held and he has it in him and it’s not rotten at all that they won’t know. It was rather more than scraps. Maybe he didn’t know how. Maybe they did make him feel less, sometimes. But it’s enough. They’re enough. He’s enough. They gave him their lives. They placed their lives in his soul and it never crossed their minds he’d come _here_ and he just has to be brave for a moment and then he can flee through the tall grass.  


His open mouth shapes strange sounds that might be words and might be bravery and love and loss and he tells them _it’s just, the_ _Potters picked Black for their Secret-Keeper, I thought you would want to know._

They already knew that. What he has is of no use. _He_ is of no use. He’s nothing. His name is nothing. And he’s…he’s not going to tell them any more. He’s told them enough.   


He could have his life if he wanted but with  _enough_ he’s no use to them, and there’s no reason, and he ripples into something small and runs but not fast enough.

He keeps their Secret.

**Author's Note:**

> I like to think that the fact Peter could have saved himself—as evidenced by canon—would qualify his sacrifice as protection enough. I don’t quite think it works that way, but the more marauder era fics I read the more James and Lily dying and Sirius going to Azkaban and Remus being alone just breaks me. Plus they have a terrible habit of making Peter almost likeable.


End file.
